Posts Tagged "Programming Theory"

NULL is Legit When Used Correctly

I was doing some research on a topic about compulsory parameters to constuctors for a project I was doing when I came across a topic about the use of NULL as a return value. Don't ask me how I stumble into these things. As you can imagine, as with everything in software engineering circles, there was a raging debate about whether or not NULL (or its equivalents like None in ...

WordPress in the Enterprise – Building in a Class Library

When you think of WordPress you might think of a lone blogger blogging about what they ate for lunch. But that is just not true anymore. With nearly 31% of the web under its control, WordPress has gained a lot of popularity due to its easy setup and extensibility. It has become a powerful Content Management System (CMS) that even an enterprise can build epic sites off of. But if ...

Rolling Dice in Java, C# and PHP

Some of the very first programs we are introduced to in programming is the idea of random numbers. This is often introduced using the idea of the die or dice. We have all seen them and have probably even thrown a set of dice at some point in our life. A die is pretty much a representation of a random number generator with a fixed range of values. The traditional ...

Stubbing Out Functions, Do You Do It?

If have ever taken a beginner programming class in school you were probably introduced to the idea of stubbing out functions. If not, let me quickly tell you what stubbing is. It is the process of identifying tasks in your design and setting up functions to handle those tasks. We define just the function signature (name, parameters and body) without writing the code statements in them. Once we identify all ...

Create an Email Activation and Unsubscribe Script in PHP

If you weren't lucky enough to get a job with Google or Facebook, or even if you did, one of the first tasks you might be asked to do in your new career as a web developer is to create a subscription form. As part of creating this form will want to collect user information up front and then sending the user an email to have them activate their account. ...

8 Tips to a Better API Design

We have all seen the numerous articles and tutorials related to great REST API design on the web. They usually talk about proper coding techniques and how to expose the endpoints in some given language. While useful, and definitely needed, they often miss some of the fundamental high level ideas that make great APIs work. In this article we will cover 8 tips which I have learned consuming and providing ...